"I hate them," said Maxine, washing dishes in the kitchen. "Greedy pigs."
"They're nothing of the kind. They like good food, and I'm thankful they do. If they didn't I don't know where I'd be."
"We might be anywhere—so long as it could be away from here. Dull, stupid, stick-in-the-muds, all of them."
"Why, they're no such thing, Maxine Pardee! They're from all over the world, pretty nearly. Why, just last Thursday they were counting there were sixteen different states represented in the eighteen people that sat down to dinner."
"Pooh! States! That isn't the world."
"What is, then?"
Maxine threw out her arms, sprinkling dish-water from her dripping finger tips with the wide-flung gesture. "Cairo! Zanzibar! Brazil! Trinidad! Seville—uh—Samar—Samarkand."
"Where's Samarkand?"
"I don't know. And I'm going to see it all some day. And the different people. The people that travel, and know about what kind of wine with the roast and the fish. You know—the kind in the novels that say, 'You've chilled this sauterne too much, Bemish."
"And when you do see all these places," retorted Mrs. Pardee, with the bitterness born of long years of experience, "you'll find that in every one of them somebody's got a boarding house called Pardee's, or something like that, where the people flock same's they do here, for a good meal."